The Flu Jab

A sideways look at age, Colin McQueen - writer, Getting Older, Humour, Memories, My Life, Real life through the kaleidoscope of age 3 Minutes
Photo by cottonbro on Pexels.com

It could have been Tesco, but I was waiting in Sainsbury’s for the pharmacist to administer my annual flu’ vaccine when it suddenly occurred to me that in my youth, when the National Health Service was an aspiration for the rest of the world, the very idea that a vital element of its armoury would one day be dispensed by a very pleasant lady in a startling polyester uniform within a major Supermarket chain by would probably have had Aneurin Bevan corkscrewing his way towards an early grave.  The absence of starched linen was striking.  I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, but not the merest hint of carbolic assaulted my epithelium.  I presume – although I am by no means certain – that such outsourcing of services, to all of our supermarket giants, is not undertaken on a non-profit basis, but is a symptom, rather, of a health service unable to cope with the volume of need and the sad realisation that you do not need to boil the towels before you stick a needle in somebody’s arm.  It bothered me…

Back in my youth, in the halcyon days of easy access to NHS G.P., Dentist and Accident & Emergency Services (I presume that this is not just my rose-tinted memory playing tricks again) I would have been surprised to ever find myself in the very middle-class environment of a Sainsbury’s store at all.  To the best of my knowledge (e.g. very little) the whole of this rural county of ours was a Sainsbury’s-Free Zone.  It was one of those shops, like Harrods, Biba and The Soho Sin-a-Rama, that you had to take a train journey ‘down south’ to visit. 

When I was a child, I remember the excitement when our estate had two former local shops knocked together in what we could charitably call an extremely rudimentary manner – the dividing wall was knocked through where the fireplaces used to be, lending a singular, if slightly alarming, tilt to the roof – and rebranded as Greenway’s Mace.  Mr Greenway – the only man to my memory on the estate that wore his brown overall over a shirt and tie – was the owner of the shop (not to mention a moustache stolen directly from the face of Jimmy Edwards) and Mace was a franchised brand of local supermarket, usually squeezed into the premises of former corner grocers by knocking through the downstairs bathroom and putting a corrugated asbestos roof over the back yard to store the perishables.  It did not have everything that Sainsbury’s had, but it did have a deli-counter that sold Luncheon Meat and Gala Pie by the slice, cream cheese and potted meat by the spoonful and a freezer filled with own-brand fish fingers and a lard-like ice cream that you stuck between two wafers and dropped on your shoe.  It had three different brands of baked beans!  It had a ‘bargain box’ full of tins that the labels had fallen off, a thousand different kinds of cigarette and if it sold alcohol at all, it was definitely under the counter with the prophylactics.

By the time I was married the day-to-day trip to Mace for the day’s shopping was a thing of the past.  Now was the time of the big shop: weekly or monthly depending on how you got paid, and it heralded the dawn of the domination of the massive supermarket chains of the day Tesco, Asda and Sainsbury’s, except if you lived around our neck of the woods, where it heralded the weekly trip to Hillards (no apostrophe), which was situated in an old sack factory on the very edge of the estate.  It was very much a supermarket of its time with shelves packed willy nilly, stacked with tins and boxes and bottles and nothing that went off too quickly.   If it could be dehydrated, Hillards stocked it.  It seemed huge and it was a place of fascination and delight.  Treats were few back then, but I did generally manage to lay my hands on four cans of Norseman lager once a month – which had the both the strength and the taste of what it forced you to do the morning after – to accompany the weekly ‘Chinese’ takeaway treat of a shared spring roll with chips and sweet & sour sauce.  It had more brands of baked beans than you could shake a stick at…

If you Google ‘Hillards’ now, all you can really find out is that it was a small supermarket chain from the North of England bought out in a hostile takeover by Tesco in May 1987 and that, if I’m honest, is why I had my vaccination at Sainsbury’s – they, to the best of my knowledge, have never been hostile to my memories…

Advertisement

Published by colinmcqueen

Published

37 thoughts on “The Flu Jab”

  3. I like the image of the Sainsbury’s lady giving flu shots. We can get them in our supermarkets too, but only where they have a pharmacy. I remember all those little corner shops. Even in London we had one. Mum and I walked down to Mr Cudd’s most days and he seemed to have all her needs. We left England in 1956 and by the time I returned (sent back to boarding school 😦 ) everything was different but not necessarily better.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. To be fair, they are in-store pharmacies. Although the idea of getting them at the checkout really appeals. Our local shop was Mrs Herriot’s, but I love the sound of Mrs Cudd’s

      Like

      1. Now that is how I see in my mind’s eye the personification of local, that the person’s name is on the shop. I recall a Miss Monty’s more recently and way back, there was Mrs Bell of Bell’s Fireplaces who came to live with us. That business I remember as a family run thing is now pretty huge. Strangely enough, I nearly died flying off of a motorbike 🏍️ just outside the original shop at the bottom of Gold Street.

        https://abell.co.uk/

        Liked by 1 person

  4. Different times. Mum dragged us off to the Sydenham Woolies on a Friday (payday!) with the promise of fish’n’chips on the way home. It worked. Ma and two overladen mule/donkey/kids staggering home with a weeks worth of groceries in bags burdening our shoulders. A weeks worth, except for twice a week trip down to Rollo’s mini-grocery for the real consumable necessities- Borkum Riff for Dad , Du Mariers for Mum, (a handful of stale Peek Frean’s surreptitiously nicked from Mr Rollo’s broken biscuit barrel for me!) and that sweet yet musty smell of loose grain and flour spilling from the tip-up bins arrayed along the base of the front counter.
    What would Health and Safety say now about that, and about the shop cat sitting on the counter?
    Sorry, misty eyed reminiscences, I came over all nostalgic for a minute there. I’ll be alright in a moment, must be something in my eye…

    Liked by 2 people

      1. For a while here they sold groceries but reverted back to what they had been, a sort of General store, selling the usual, melamine mugs cheap made-in-china China, flannels, kettles, tea-cosies etc. Flip top chairs- now theres a seat for sore ey-asses.

        Liked by 1 person

  5. When I was a small boy we had a corner grocery store and what were called “supermarkets” were only larger grocery stores, not the sprawling “supercenters” of today. If I ever make it for a visit I will try to remember that I want to shop at Sainsbury’s.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. Yeah, that Woolies we went to was massive for the times, it would have had the footprint/floor plan of, say an olympic sized swimming pool! Barely big enough for a for a Starbucks these days. Now we have supermarkets that take up half a block.

      Liked by 2 people

  6. The first supermarket in our small town was a Keymarkets, which is, I believe, one of the first places to ‘use a shopping basket/trolley and pay a cashier at a till at the end’ model. I don’t remember much about the shop, but I do remember once when we got home and Mum started packing the weekly shop away, there was a shriek, then I got dragged back down to the town again at a fair clip (we only lived a short walk from the High Street then). My small baby brother was still there in his pram, parked outside the shop where we’d left him while we did the shopping, but apparently had forgotten we had him and left him outside in his pram when we were finished…
    Those were the days, eh? When you could leave a baby outside the shop in a pram. Nearly all day, as it turns out.

    Liked by 2 people

      1. I don’t think my little brother (47) knows of this incident to this day. My mother swore me to secrecy at the time for some reason, and it just bubbled up in my memory now…

        Liked by 1 person

  7. In Kirkwall, Orkney, there was a Presto supermarket and yes it is now a Tesco. Never, ever, ever will I forget the day I was about to go shopping and as I got out of the car, I checked what cash I had in my purse and the wind took a few notes. The kids tried to catch them, but to no avail. That was a rough week, a really rough week, as the shopping had to be stretched to fit the amount left. You know I think I lost £60 that day! One of those life lessons that really could have been predicted and hardly believable to anyone who lives there.

    Liked by 2 people

      2. A gusto outside Presto = no dough. That pic shows a pretty dour car park and plain bleak ol’ shop. Sympathies on the grievous loss, that’s the kind of chilling bitter blow that cuts to the quick, especially off Scotland.

        Liked by 1 person

Comments are closed.